As I’ve writ­ten about before, I have begun to exper­i­ment with the world of smarthome devices, and cur­rently use a smartth­ings hub and a google home mini. So far these have just turned on lamps and oth­er “plugged in” devices via smart­plugs, but with more com­pat­ible devices at reas­on­able prices finally start­ing to appear I wanted to start doc­u­ment­ing more of what I’ve tried… Read Full Art­icle

If you have BT sport and try to view it on a Win­dows 7 PC you will find sev­er­al warn­ings and the con­tent may even not play. This is done entirely delib­er­ately by BT (at Microsoft’s behest?) for no tech­nic­al reas­ons what-so-ever. You can eas­ily get it work­ing again… Read Full Art­icle

With the news that WiFi will get a new ver­sion next year, and that it will be called WiFi 6, I thought I’d knock up a little guide to the pre­vi­ous ver­sions of WiFi that we’ve had… Read Full Art­icle

WDS really is quite an unfriendly sys­tem. Clunky, fiddly, and prone ot fail­ure without help­ful error inform­a­tion. After updat­ing some of my unat­ten­ded files I was no longer able to carry out unat­ten­ded install­a­tions, but have even­tu­ally solved the series of mis­lead­ing errors… Read Full Art­icle

I’ve had this error sev­er­al times over the years, and it always seems to be for a dif­fer­ent reas­on. So below I will col­late all the pos­sible sources of the prob­lem I have so far encountered, along with solu­tions… Read Full Art­icle

I have enough PCs in the house that I set up a WDS serv­er to make it easi­er to rein­stall win­dows if any of them go wrong. They have a lot of dif­fer­ent hard­ware and so I needed to add some drivers to the boot image which is from a Win­dows 10 retail DVD. How­ever, I got an error when try­ing to add them because the ver­sion of DISM used by WDS on serv­er 2012 is older than the ver­sion required by Win­dows 10 images… Read Full Art­icle

Most PCs that I encounter have drives that are full. This was the case in the days of HDD, and with mod­ern SSD typ­ic­ally being smal­ler it is even worse. A full drive will slow your PC down, as well as the annoy­ance of run­ning out of space at a key moment. Here are a good range of ways of free­ing up space… Read Full Art­icle

A few years back I migrated from Win­dows Media Centre to Kodi (thanks to Microsoft for end­ing sup­port and devel­op­ment of MC). Kodi is widely used and very ver­sat­ile, how­ever it has nev­er worked quite flaw­lessly and I con­tin­ue to come across a range of annoy­ing issues. Where I have found a solu­tion I will doc­u­ment it below… Read Full Art­icle

SmartTh­ings com­pat­ible smart plugs are annoy­ingly expens­ive — typ­ic­ally around £40. This is far too expens­ive to con­sider buy­ing many of. There are how­ever WiFi plugs avail­able online for around £10 that don’t offi­cially work with SmartTh­ings. Most of them are based on the ESP8266 chip which can be reflashed with new firm­ware that will work with SmartTh­ings. Below I doc­u­ment my tri­als and tribu­la­tions with hack­ing these plugs… Read Full Art­icle

Cheap WiFi SmartPlugs with SmartThings(447 views)SmartThings compatible smart plugs are annoyingly expensive - typically around £40. This is far too expensive to consider buying many of. There are however WiFi plugs available online for around £10 that don't officially work ...